Roads and Transport

With few roads save for those last properly repaired by the Romans, and with only a few stone bridges, transport over long distances was not only difficult but expensive. Where possible, goods were transported by sea or river rather than by land. It was the extensive English coastline, and the access which its rivers supplied to inland markets, that rendered England itself a land so fit for trade, part of an island whose climate and geology permitted the production of an agricultural surplus, blessed with mineral resources, and with plentiful supplies of timber to serve as fuel, yet with no real extremes of climate, no insurmountable mountain chains, and with no part of the island further than a few miles from a navigable river leading ultimately to the sea. Cotton-in-the-Elms in Derbyshire, reckoned by the Ordnance Survey to be the most ‘inland’ spot in England, is in fact only five miles from the river Trent and only forty-five miles from the start of the river’s tidal estuary.

England’s rivers were not only full of fish but were a major source of power in driving water mills, by 1066 already a regular feature of the landscape. Moreover, in the temperate English climate, these were rivers for the most part free from disease and in particular from malarial mosquitoes. Just as the tsetse fly continues to hold back the agrarian economies of Africa, so in the Middle Ages the malarial swamps of southern France or central Italy served as a barrier to prosperity from which England was for the most part exempt, though tertian malaria or ‘spring fever’ was endemic in certain fenland areas until the nineteenth century. In the meantime, access to rivers and the sea meant that it was easier and cheaper, even in the twelfth century, to ship coals to London from Newcastle and the Durham coal fields, than it was, say, to sell Hampshire grain in the markets of Somerset, or Yarmouth herrings in Warwickshire. Water-borne trade itself served as a major encouragement to the development of English shipping and ultimately of English naval strength. From the eleventh century through to the evacuation of Dunkirk in 1940, it was the small ships of the many dozens of havens and ports scattered along the southern and eastern coasts that served as the guarantors of England’s defence.

Today, the journey from London to Ipswich by car is only sixty miles, about an hour’s drive on a very dull road. From the air, however, the picture shows a ribboned and shredded coastline, one crucial to English history: many hundreds of miles of tidal mudbanks, monotonous to the eye, but dotted with havens where a boat can be landed, and with easy access to the Essex forests from which came the timber to build boats. It was within sight of these estuarial waters that much of the fate of eleventh century England was decided. It was here that the Viking fleets sought to hide, and it was here, at the battles of Maldon and Assendon, that Viking armies, themselves consisting of so many boatloads of marauders, decisively defeated English armies by land. The sea brought danger and foreign invaders, but it also brought wealth and an opportunity for nautical prowess. Even today, nearly a third of England’s overseas trade enters and leaves via the single great port of Felixstowe. The well-kept lawns and rich wine cellars of the modern University of Cambridge are to a large extent maintained from the profits of Felixstowe’s steel and concrete economy.

In the Middle Ages, it was no coincidence that it was another eastern town, Norwich, with easy access to the profits of North Sea trade, that was perhaps the richest in the kingdom. Nor should it be forgotten that Norfolk was the county of Nelson, himself raised at Burnham Market, within strolling distance of the oozing estuarial mudbanks of Burnham Stathe. Market, harbour and the defence of the realm form a highly significant trinity. The shipping of southern and eastern England was crucial not only to trade but to England’s military reputation overseas. In the eleventh century, one of the most vivid passages in the contemporary life of Edward the Confessor describes a great warship, given to the King. It was with gifts such as this that political disputes were healed. The money to pay for ships and their crews of eighty or more oarsmen was one of the more significant tax burdens placed upon society. Galley service was perhaps even more important to the Anglo-Saxon military than service on land and, already by 1066, ports such as Hastings were obliged to supply regular quotas of ships or men to the King’s service.